An admission form is the questionnaire an applicant fills in before becoming a learner. Admission Forms is where you build it: which questions are asked, in what order, of which type, how long the form stays open, and which class it is aimed at. Every application in your Applications queue belongs to one of these forms.

The secretary or the head of school owns this screen, and works on it once per intake — before the admission season opens rather than during it. The reason to do it early is that the fields are mapped to the school’s own records: a field mapped to the learner’s name or the requested class is what later fills the enrolment form automatically, so a question asked twice is a question that has to be retyped by a human.

Two things make a good form here. Ask only what you will use. Every extra field is a chance for a family to leave it blank, and a blank required field is a support call. And build on the default template rather than from nothing: Ekati opens a new form already loaded with the fields a school almost always needs — the pupil’s details, the guardian’s details, the requested level, and a documents section for the birth certificate, previous school records and anything else.

Pick the narrowest type that fits the answer

Short text, Email, Phone, Date, Dropdown, Single choice, Multiple choice, Paragraph, Single file and Multiple files are the types on offer. The narrowest one is always the best: a phone number entered as Phone is validated and shown consistently, while the same number typed into a Short text box will eventually arrive with a space in it and be called twice. Paragraph is for addresses and anything else genuinely long; Short text is for everything a line can hold.

Single choice beats a dropdown for short lists

A family choosing between First Year and Second Year can see both options at once in a Single choice field, where a Dropdown hides them until it is clicked. Reserve Dropdown for long lists, such as a requested class in a school with fifteen of them.

Required is a promise you must be able to keep

Only tick Required for a field you will genuinely block an application without, and only when you can supply the answer another way. A required birth certificate that families do not have means a queue of applications that cannot move; a document field that is optional, with the missing papers chased later, keeps the queue moving and is usually kinder.

File fields have limits worth stating in the label

A file question accepts only the types you allow and only up to the size you set, and the default for documents is PDF and common image formats at 10 MB. Families take a photo of a paper document with their phone far more often than they scan it, so make sure photographs are among the accepted types — and then say so in the help text under the question, because a family who is told to photograph a document will do it, while one who is left guessing will send a photograph anyway.

What a mapped field actually does

Each question can carry a Student / enrollment field mapping. When you map a question to the learner’s name, their email, their phone, their date of birth, their place of birth, their nationality, their guardian’s details or the requested class, the answer is no longer just text in a pile — it becomes part of the file that is created when the applicant is approved.

That is why the default template already carries these mappings on its first questions. Leave them in place and approval becomes a formality: the answers arrive in the enrolment form already filled, ready to be checked and saved. Remove a mapping by accident and the same applicant has to be retyped by hand, field by field, on the morning they start school.

Requested level is the mapping worth checking twice

The requested-class field is the one that decides where the learner goes. On the enrolment form it appears as the level requested, resolved against your real classes. Before you open an intake, check that a class a family will ask for actually exists and has room, because a request that matches nothing has to be resolved by hand and comes back as a phone call.

Questions you add yourself are simply questions

A field you invent — a previous school’s name, a health condition, how the family heard about you — carries no mapping, and that is fine. Its answer is stored with the application and visible to whoever reviews it, which is all you asked of it. Use it for the information you genuinely need; do not try to make it a record field.